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 Maxwell abstained from making any choice. It is not that he has a systematic contempt for all that positive methods cannot reach, as may be seen from the time he has devoted to the kinetic theory of gases. I may add that if in his magnum opus he develops no complete explanation, he has attempted one in an article in the Philosophical Magazine. The strangeness and the complexity of the hypotheses he found himself compelled to make, led him afterwards to withdraw it.

The same spirit is found throughout his whole work. He throws into relief the essential—i.e., what is common to all theories; everything that suits only a particular theory is passed over almost in silence. The reader therefore finds himself in the presence of form nearly devoid of matter, which at first he is tempted to take as a fugitive and unassailable phantom. But the efforts he is thus compelled to make force him to think, and eventually he sees that there is often something rather artificial in the theoretical "aggregates" which he once admired.